March 22, 2010

Pardon us for saying but this is bloody brilliant. Beat Sheet Central is author, screenwriter, and director Nicholas Jarecki‘s site where he collects breakdowns — *beat sheets* — of movies and tv episodes for your free learning pleasure.

Often when I’m writing a film or teleplay, I like to go back and look at movies and TV shows in similar genres and see how they are constructed. The point of this site is to collect beat sheets for every movie and TV episode, generated by you, the users, by watching the pieces and writing down exactly what happens.

(Novelists and memoirists, don’t go thinking you have a Get Out of Jail Free card. Nope. Learning to “beat out” your lengthier stories is every bit as beneficial. Bonus: if you can do it for a film, you can do it for a book.)